In organizations, business data, such as financial data and operational data, is typically stored in a data store with time information. In order to assist business users to examine their business data, various data analyzing applications are proposed. Using a data analyzing application, business users can navigate through data in a time dimension relevant to their business. For example, a user may be interested in viewing data from the previous quarter, last January or last year.
Existing data analyzing applications typically support a time dimension having multiple levels of time. Organizations may use a conventional Gregorian calendar to define the time dimension that they use. However, there are various ways of dividing time into levels or a hierarchy of continuous periods that follows certain patterns based on conventional calendars and time designations. For example, time may be divided by Day, Week, Calendar Week, Business Week (less than 7 days), Calendar Month, Lunar or Manufacturing Month (4 or 5 week month), Lunar or Manufacturing Quarter (13 week), Semester and Year.
Also, there are many additions and variations of time divisions into basic units and various summary levels on top of this basic unit set. Companies frequently start their fiscal year, quarter and month differently than those conventional calendar divisions. Companies may see time differently than the real world time. For example, a broadcast company may have a 28-hour day, beginning at midnight on the east coast and ending at midnight on the west coast. Further, time dimension hierarchies are often complicated by the overlap of different periods. In particular, the weekly boundaries do not coincide with the month, quarter and Year boundaries.
Thus, in organizations with fiscal or business calendars that do not align directly with the Gregorian calendar, users need to translate from one to the other in order to comprehend the data in terms of real world time. For example, when a user looks for the impact of a business event that occurred last February, the user needs to know if last February is Q4 or Q1 in their business calendar. Also, some business calendars have complex hierarchies that are difficult to navigate. For example, in a weekly manufacturing calendar, it is difficult to know if week 13 falls in Q1 or Q2.
User interfaces of existing data analyzing applications for time navigation support either Gregorian calendar date selection, or hierarchical navigation of the business calendar dimension. Hierarchical navigation of the business calendar is typically provided using cascading menus. Cascading structures however do not provide visual feedback of the business calendar. Also, they do not show how far along the business is in any given period regardless of granularity. These user interfaces do not have ability to translate between the Gregorian calendar and the business calendar. It is often difficult or unintuitive for users to select time that they are interested.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide a user interface system that allows users to easily understand relationships between a real world calendar and their business calendar.